This is a guest post by Anna Batzeli.
This post introduces the Archives Portal Europe, an online archival repository which allows simultaneous archival research in thousands of institutions from more than thirty European countries, through one simple online search system. This can be a great resource for researchers working on topics relevant to readers of the Digital Orientalist.
Brief Introduction of Archives Portal Europe
Archives Portal Europe (APE) was established in 2009 and brings together descriptive archival catalogues from more than 30 countries, in 24 languages (and 5 different alphabets), and from a large variety of institutions: national archives, community archives, parish archives, university archives, corporate and private archives, and others. APE currently holds information on around 7,000 archival institutions, of which over a thousand actively contribute with content, and it holds more than 280 million archival descriptive units. At the same time, Archives Portal Europe is constantly expanding to make more material available for research.
Online Search in Archives Portal Europe
APE can be of great use to researchers working on case-studies related to Africa, Central Asia, India, Islamic countries, China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, Oceania and/or Pacific. Through a simple keyword search, for example the word “Africa”, researchers can access over 20,000 items related to Africa and Euro-African relations from over 20 countries, covering a wide temporal period. Indicative examples of the research outcomes include a 1794 thematic map of Africa from the Baden-Württemberg State Archives, Dept. 7. Main State Archives Stuttgart (see figure 1) and a 1900 photograph of the Table Mountain at Cape Town in South Africa from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, France (see figure 2). These can be useful teaching materials.
Figure 1
figure 2
For those seeking archival items for Central Asian countries, APE can be a valuable source as well. For example, one can access photos from the German journalist Romy Schurhammer visit to Afghanistan in 1977 (see figure 3) and information on Norway’s projects and interventions in Central Asia during 2004-2007.
Figure 3: Romy Schurhammer visit to Afghanistan, 1977
APE may serve as an invaluable tool for digital archival research for historians and archivists working in other Digital Orientalist fields. Indicative single-word search results include:
- For the word “India” 43,574 results and the word “China” 42,427 results. Both searches cover a wide temporal, spatial and thematic range,
- the same applies for the words “Japan” (30,815 results), “Korea” (9,779 items), “South Asia” (1,392), “Oceania” (414), “Pacific” (5,758), “Islam” (4,045), “Islamic” (845) and “islamique” (1,151).
Apart from simple keyword search, researchers can apply advanced search by keyword, topic, institution or document type in multiple languages and access archival descriptions of relevant digitised documents and digital objects (such as photographs) whenever available.
All in all, the wide spatial and temporal range of the available items in Archives Portal Europe, enables researchers to fill research lacunas in their field, covering various perspectives without needing to consult individual archives separately.
Googling in the European Archives
Archives Portal Europe recently surpassed 300 million finding aids. The wealth of the available sources facilitate archival research for historians, but at the same time, it is advisable to apply advanced research, as single-word search results might be quite wide. For example, with a single word search such as the word ‘Africa’, someone can access over 20,000 items.
Search results can be narrowed down if additional search filters are selected, for example “Country” and “Archival Institution” that allow narrowing down to the countries and/or archival institutions of interest.
Visit also archivesportaleurope & archivesportaleurope.
A beginner in Archives Portal Europe may try multiple searches to get familiarised with the Portal and to detect all archival items related to his research subject. It should be added that Archives Portal Europe provide access only to the link to digitised collections (held on the webspace of their institutions) and/or descriptions of the collections. If digital items or detailed descriptions are not available, one has to contact the respective institution, prior to organising a field visit.
Additionally, APE provide some tips and guides for search in the Portal at the following link: https://www.archivesportaleurope.net/tools/research-tools/
Researchers can further facilitate the usage of the Portal through contributing in the development of search with a theme-based function. Theme-based topics are the results of a collective effort between archivists and researchers. The Archives Portal Europe Content Providers assign a topic to their archival collections as they ingest them in Archives Portal Europe, and users and volunteers can improve this by also assigning topics to the documents they search and creating new topics (for more information, see https://www.archivesportaleurope.net/explore/). Archives Portal Europe also runs special laboratories and workshops to create new topics. To know more about how topics are organised and created, please visit Portal’s research tools section at: https://www.archivesportaleurope.net/tools/research-tools/
Innovation & Limitations of the Portal
Archives Portal Europe provides a new way to approach archival research: rather than selecting one archive to visit and discover its finding at the premise, it makes it possible to start with the subject one wants to investigate, and go through thousands of archival catalogues scattered across Europe, using keyword searches.
The vastness of the project behind APE (preparing in digital format centuries of archival catalogues held in hundreds of thousands of institutions) makes it a constant work in progress; furthermore, its repository depends on the budgets and possibilities of each participating institution to continue its digitisation process. For this reason, it is always important to keep in mind several caveats when using the portal. First of all, a word is interpreted by the search engine as a string of characters to be matched in the repository, not in its semantic way. Furthermore, the high multilinguality of the portal should be taken into account: searching for “Africa” will not include “Afrique” (French), “África” (Spanish), “Afrika” (German), “Αφρική” (Greek) and so on. Using wildcards and boolean operators, as explained in the Research Tools section, can overcome many spelling problems, but at the moment these expedients must be used “by hand”, they are not automatised.
Finally, all the information available in the portal, from the archival descriptions themselves to the extra metadata tagged to the archival descriptions (e.g., “Topic”) are curated and managed directly by each institution, with extremely different levels of accuracy. For example, some collections do not have any descriptions, but only codes – which makes them effectively impossible to find via keyword search in their current form. Another common bug related to the metadata, which hamper the functioning of the filters: for example, the date filters only work if the date of a collection is indicated in machine-readable format, which is not always the case: very often the portal will have collections titled “Photographs, 1900-1920”, where the dates are part of the title but not indicated in the date span metadata, and therefore would be left out if filtering by date. Another fitting example is the “Topic” filter, which in itself would be tremendously useful as an alternative to keyword search, but that it is currently only used by institutions in four countries; Archives Portal Europe is developing an automated topic detection tool to help institutions and researchers in assigning topics to collections (it is possible to read more here) , but again, this is a work in progress.
Additional Ways to Get Involved
Historians, archivists and researchers in related Digital Orientalist fields can join APE as Registered Users, as Ambassadors, as Content Providers, as Country Managers, or as Associates.
As a Registered User, you will have your own virtual office on APE to save your searches, share them with anyone you want, and collaborate with the portal. All functionalities are completely free of charge.
As an Ambassador, you will promote the usage of APE in your country, in your language and for your interest. If you are a student, this is a unique experience to work closely with archival institutions in your area as well as at an international level – but the scheme is open to anyone interested in collaborating with APE. The benefits of becoming an ambassador include professional networking, development of new skills, preferential access to APE grants and access to a world-wide community of researchers and cultural heritage professionals.
As a Content Provider, you can ingest material from your archival institution. Your holdings will be made findable from everywhere in the world, together with hundreds of other archival institutions, and at your conditions. You will also be able to join an international network of archivists. The latter will enable you to liaise for projects and be in the loop about the digital future of archival heritage.
If your country is not represented in Archives Portal Europe, you may join as a Country Manger. Archives Portal Europe is about the history of Europe, but they welcome archives from any country in the world, and they are always looking to expand their network to become more inclusive. The advantages of being a Country Manager include opening of the archival heritage of your country to the world, sharing know-how and best practices, development of networking and partnerships.
If you want to not only contribute, but to shape the future of Archives Portal Europe and become one of the institutions that ensure its long-term sustainability, then you should consider becoming an Associate. Any entity can become an Associate if it qualifies as a European Archival Institution, such as any institution that works to preserve documents and sources related to the history of Europe, exclusively or not exclusively, and if it qualifies as a European Archival Research Institution, such as any institution that promotes research on the history of Europe, exclusively or not exclusively. For more information about the process, check the Archives Portal Europe website.
Anna Batzeli is working as a postdoctoral researcher on different case-studies in the Balkan region and in Greece and as senior bid manager/proposal writer for EU funding. Find out more here; you can follow her on LinkedIn or X.
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